In France we have a lot of problems with the name service of some Japanese sites: the distance between us and them is a little bit more than 30 hops then with a too small UDP default time to live the packets are dropped in transit with a TIME_EXCEEDED error... A recommendation should be produce about this in the IETF DNS group. I propose to recommend that "on name servers default TTLs must be set to a value greater or equal to 60" immediatly in RIPE. Regards Francis.Dupont@inria.fr PS: for network operators: you should note the DNS packets in transit with TTL less than 20 and signal them to senders. This can be spread to other services.